Every year, The Singapore Women’s Weekly shines the spotlight on 18 outstanding, powerful and high-achieving career women in the Great Women Of Our Time awards. Meet Finance & Commerce nominee, Karen Tok, Founder and Advisor of boutique recruitment agency ScienTec Consulting:

“Life sciences was a virtually non-existent industry in Singapore when I started out in 2002,” shares Karen who founded ScienTec Consulting, which specialises in recruiting executives the life sciences industry.

Building her company from scratch meant that Karen had to tackle all the challenges that young start-ups face head-on. This, after a lifetime of disappointments from being called a no-hoper in school to facing two successive retrenchments in her twenties. You can read more about how she turned failure into a stepping stone to success here.

Despite her challenges, Karen still managed to steer her company to profitability. Here, the dynamic mum-of-one shares her top entrepreneurial tips for success:

The Great Women Of Our Time Awards 2018 is brought to you by main presenter, Lancôme, and presenter, PANDORA.

Are you self-employed? Or are you a business owner?

“Knowing the difference between the two, will help you to set your business direction. Being self-employed means becoming your own boss. Your business only makes money when you work. On the other hand, being a business owner, means creating a business with automation processes. This allows your business to run on its own. This distinction is critical as it influences how you shape your business, and helps to avoid major re-engineering of it further down the line.”

Photo: Pixabay

Identify successful mentors to learn from

“It’s critical to always review and innovate your processes and best practices for powerful results. Experienced mentors can help you out in these areas so if you can’t find one who can cover all the areas, find on for each area.”

Photo: Pixabay

Develop your stuff

“It’s not enough to simply recruit the right people – you need to develop and inspire them to greater heights. During the scaling up stage of my business, we hired 15 new consultants within three months and provided them with an intensive month-long classroom training before putting them on the job. But by the end of six months, we lost 14 of them, either through termination due to poor performance or resignation due to pressure. It was a very expensive mistake, which made me realise that a company can only scale its business through its people. So I shifted our focus to creative more effective training, strong performance measurement, career growth opportunities, and building a fun and inspiring company culture. Since then, we’ve scaled from a head count of 10 to 40 within three years, and our revenue has soared from two million to 11 million.”

If you are inspired by Karen Tok, vote for her here and stand a chance to win a gift set comprising of Lancôme beauty products & Forever PANDORA Collier Necklace, worth over $220!